Fish hydrolysate is an awesome product for promoting plant growth. It’s high in Nitrogen, can be naturally produced, and is an awesome food for microbes. Fungi love it and it is easily produced at home. We use it as straight fertiliser, animal supplement and an ingredient in compost teas (Fungi: Bacteria balanced- Fungi orientated).

Fish hydrolysate is composed of fish and glucose based sugars and uses lacto bacillus to break everything down using enzymes. Fish hydryolysate doesn’t undergo the heating and skimming process that you get with fish emulsion products. Heating breaks down beneficial amino acid chains and this cold process also retains the fats and oils that microbes love.

This article documents the major patterning of the farm at Ridgedale PERMACULTURE as we laid the Keyline tree lanes and planted thousands of long term perennial crops within our pasture lanes. For a better introduction to the farm's context you can read an article here. Water systems and Keyline patterning is also addressed here. The original plan for the tree layers of the farm design is outlined in another article available here. So now we explain & assess the actual implementation. For context, at the time of this work we ourselves had only been on site for 6 weeks and the planning, layout, machine work and major planting all took place in Week 1 and 2 of our 10 Week Internship. (We have another 10 Week Internship program running July- Sept)

We have been a little behind with our fortnightly awesome book giveaway and other admin duties. Ridgedale Richard has been working abroad the last couple of months and in the meantime Ridgedale Yohanna has been organizing and managing the spring orders and deliveries for Ridgedale. We just ordered 13 species of mushroom sawdust spawn we'll be putting into logs thinned from our dense riparian areas. Lion's Mane (hericium erinaceus), Shiitake (lentinus edodes), Cauliflower (sprassis crispa), King Oyster (pleurotus eryngii), Pioppino (agrocybe aegerita), Enoki (flammulina velutipes), Nameko (pholiota nameko), Pearl Oyster (pleurotus ostreatus), Elm Oyster (hypsizygus ulmarius), Blue Oyster (pleurotus columbinus) , Common Oyster (pleurotus pulmonarius), Tarragon Oyster (pleurotus euosmus) & Branched Oyster (pleurotus cornucopiae). We have plenty of willow, alder & some oak to thin, so we can turn thinnings into high quality food. To celebrate spring around the corner we thought we would give away a copy of Paul Stamets awesome book. Read more for details...